Just a Conservative musing, raving, and joking

2009 International Conference on Climate Change

A veritable “who’s who” of climate scientists, who are “in the same camp with Holocaust Deniers,” are meeting this week in New York City. An expected crowd of 800 will be in attendance for the three day event, featuring no less than 73 conference speakers (most with Ph.D.’s), sponsored by the Heartland Institute. Details of the event are being posted on The Climate Scam blog.

Here is a snipit from the opening remarks by Joseph L. Blast

If the scientific community were convinced that we could reliably forecast future climates, or that the consequences of some warming would be catastrophic, then perhaps no price would be too high to pay to save the Earth. But that is not what the scientific community is telling us. According to the most recent international poll of climate scientists,

* But that “consensus” drops to below 60 percent when climate scientists are asked if “climate change is mostly the result of anthropogenic causes.”

* 65 percent of climate scientists do not believe “climate models can accurately predict climate conditions in the future.”

* 68 percent do not believe “the current state of scientific knowledge is able to provide reasonable predictions of climatic variability on time scales of ten years.”

* 73 percent do not believe it is possible to predict climate “on time scales of 100 years.”

* About 70 percent of climate scientists think “climate change might have some positive effects for some societies.”

* Finally, on the question that might matter the most, climate scientists are perfectly split over the question of whether they know enough about global warming to turn it over to policymakers to take action, with 44 percent saying we do and 46 percent saying we do not.

This extensive disagreement within the scientific community is not reflected in the reports of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. Why is that? Maybe because, to quote Alexander Cockburn again, “the IPCC has the usual army of functionaries and grant farmers, and the merest sprinkling of actual scientists with the prime qualification of being climatologists or atmospheric physicists.”

Here is a small part of the remarks made by Richard Liznden, Ph.D.

Global warming alarm has always been a political movement, and opposing it has always been an up-hill battle.

In this talk I wish to point out some simple truths that are often forgotten by our side of this issue.

First, being skeptical about global warming does not, by itself, make one a good scientist; nor does endorsing global warming make one, per se, a poor scientist. Most of the atmospheric scientists who I respect do endorse global warming. The important point, however, is that the science that they do that I respect is not about global warming. Endorsing global warming just makes their lives easier.

For example, my colleague, Kerry Emanuel, received relatively little recognition until he suggested that hurricanes might become stronger in a warmer world (a position that I think he has since backed away from somewhat). He then was inundated with professional recognition.

Another colleague, Carl Wunsch, professionally calls into question virtually all alarmist claims concerning sea level, ocean temperature, and ocean modeling, but assiduously avoids association with skeptics; if nothing else, he has several major oceanographic programs to worry about. Moreover, his politics are clearly liberal.

Perhaps the most interesting example is Wally Broecker, whose work clearly shows that sudden climate change occurs without anthropogenic influence, and is a property of cold rather than warm climates. However, he staunchly beats the drums for alarm and is richly rewarded for doing so.

For a much larger group of scientists, the fact that they can make ambiguous or even meaningless statements that can be spun by alarmists, and that the alarming spin leads politicians to increase funding, provides little incentive to complain about the spin.

and

The process of coopting science on behalf of a political movement has had an extraordinarily corrupting influence on science — especially since the issue has been a major motivation for funding. Most funding for climate would not be there without this issue. And, it should be added, most science funded under the rubric of climate does not actually deal with climate, but rather with the alleged impact of arbitrarily assumed climate change.

Strangely, no news has been released by the MSM. I guess Al Gore was unavailable for comment.